by John Nichols
Carl let his eyes flick over to Bernabé, who had dropped his eyes to where his boot tips—pointing outward from being on the wrong feet—were scuffing self-consciously in the dust.
The district supervisor asked, “What are you driving at, Bernie?”
“What I’m driving at is I don’t think there’s any way to prove that cow had actually trespassed the legal amount of time on government land, so in all fairness you oughtta just let José take it home, and if you sent him one of them letters you oughtta kill the copy in your files, and forget about the fine and the permit reduction, and then everybody will be happy, qué no, boys?”
This time the boys grinned, muttering, “That’s right, Bernie,” or “Que sí, sheriff,” things like that.
Carl protested, “Bernie, you’re a damn fool, you don’t know your ass from government law in this case.”
The sheriff remarked, “It’s your ass that has got a bullseye painted on it right now, Carl.”
Whereupon Floyd Cowlie hissed in Carl’s ear, “Do like he says, you idiot, what are you trying to do, get us both killed?”
Put that way, Carl suffered a reluctant change of heart. “Well … uh, okay, Bernie. I guess maybe you’re right. I hadn’t exactly considered things in that light.”
“I didn’t figure you had,” Bernabé said, daring to look up now as he added, “So how about stashing that firearm, okay?”
“Sure,” Carl said amenably, slowly and gingerly slipping the pistol back into the holster. “Course, I wouldn’t of shot nobody,” he laughed. “Shit, you boys know that.” He couldn’t quite bring himself to uncurl his fingers from the grip, however.
The boys didn’t say anything, so Bernabé prompted, “Hell, you boys knew that, right?”
“Rrrrriiiiggggght…” the boys mumbled slowly, reluctantly letting it out.
“Okay. So why don’t we break it up now, huh? José, you take that skinny heifer back home, or back to Pacheco’s place, and see if you can’t keep better track of it next time.”
With that, carefully unwinding, the men got into their pickups, started their engines, and slowly pulled away from the corral. By way of an adios, Joe tooted his horn and waved gaily at the sheriff and the two Forest Service personnel, then led his cow up the road at a brisk trot.
Bernabé grumbled, “I oughtta arrest you, Carl, for pulling that gun. What’s the matter with you anyway?”
“But did you see what they did? They just came by and took that cow. In a hundred years nobody ever did anything like that. I could take every one of those bastards to court—”
“Sure you could. And I could sit tight at home out on the front porch in a rocker with my boot heels up on the railing while they had another Smokey the Bear santo riot, or did you forget about that? And then when it was all over I could mosey on down to the camposanto with a wine jug tucked under my arm and help them dig your and Floyd there’s graves.”
Carl squatted and picked up a handful of dirt, letting it trickle through his fingers, thoughtful as he replied, “Nothing like this ever happened before.” As he spoke, a bird, a little pine siskin, flitted through the corral fence, zipping low to the ground, and for some reason did not register Carl’s bulk in its way. Carl never saw it coming, either, and when the hapless bird banged head-on into his ear he gave a startled yelp, tumbling over sideways as if struck by a bullet. The siskin landed upside down several feet away, and lay on its back in the dust, flopping and kicking spastically while issuing pained chirrupy gurgles.
“For chrissakes!” Floyd Cowlie exclaimed.
But none of them could move, not Bernabé nor Floyd, nor Carl lying on his side with his head in the dust, staring at the gasping bird.
Suddenly the siskin righted itself and ruffled its feathers, shaking out the dust as it blinked a few times, and then with a hotshot rocketing little explosion it took off again, only to collide immediately with a corral post and bounce back into the dust knocked out cold.
Astonished as he was, Bernabé went over and picked up the bird and frowned at it, unable to summon the proper words for the occasion.
After a moment the intrepid siskin opened its eyes and shivered, coming back to life. When Bernabé figured it was in possession of all its faculties, including that of flight, he threw it up in the air, expecting that it would take off.
Instead, the bird never once flapped a wing, plowing back to earth like a shot, causing a minuscule explosion of dust when it smacked into the dirt, breaking its neck.
“Nothing like that ever happened before either,” Bernabé finally managed to croak.
* * *
As everyone knows, Smokey the Bear is a symbol of the United States Forest Service. And for almost a hundred years the United States Forest Service had been the greatest landholder in Chamisa County, although most of the land it held had once not so very long ago belonged to the people of Milagro. And, since the Forest Service’s management of its recently acquired property tended to benefit Ladd Devine the Third, big timber and mining companies, and out-of-state hunters and tourists before it benefited the poor people of Milagro, the poor people of Milagro tended to look upon Smokey the Bear as a kind of ursine Daddy Warbucks, Adolf Hitler, colonialist Uncle Sam, and Ladd Devine all rolled into one.
Many years ago, the alcoholic expatriate santo carver Snuffy Ledoux, who was so poor at that particular moment in time that he was practically baking and eating his own Monkey Ward boots, had contracted with the then District Forest Supervisor Buddy Gabaldón (Carl Abeyta’s predecessor) to mass produce a line of little foot-high wooden Smokey the Bears, which Buddy planned to sell to tourists who stopped by Forest Service headquarters for maps and fire permits, snakebite kits and bug repellent, and so forth. Snuffy had contracted to make the Smokeys for a buck and a half apiece, and Buddy sold them for three dollars.
As it turned out, these hand-carved and hand-painted little Floresta talismans moved like hotcakes. But not exactly in the way the district supervisor had had in mind.
No tourist ever wound up with a little wooden Smokey. Because as soon as they went on sale in the headquarters, people from town began stealing them off the counter. So Buddy put them inside the glass display case, whereupon the locals actually began to pay money for them hand over fist. Buddy couldn’t believe how popular Snuffy Ledoux’s wooden Smokeys were. They were so popular, in fact, that one day a one-armed bandit with a black kerchief over his face, accompanied by a huge and ferocious three-legged German shepherd, marched into Forest Service headquarters, flung an empty feed sack on the counter, pointed the business end of a .45 automatic at Buddy Gabaldón’s Adam’s apple, and suggested Buddy stuff all the Smokeys he had in stock into that bag, which Buddy—who had a great lust for his own life—was more than happy to do.
The question, of course, was: Why were these statuettes so popular with the local folk? And the answer was: People were treating those pudgy, diminutive Floresta santos the way one might treat a voodoo doll. In short, they kicked the little Smokeys around their houses; they poured kerosene on the little Smokeys and lit them; they hammered nails into the little Smokeys; and in a great many other imaginative and bestial ways they desecrated Snuffy Ledoux’s carvings in hopes of either destroying the United States Forest Service or at least driving that Forest Service away from Chamisa County, and, in particular, away from Milagro.
When Snuffy Ledoux realized how popular his carvings had become, he decided to break his contract with Buddy Gabaldón, who was more than happy to accommodate the artisan because he—Buddy—hadn’t logged a decent night’s repose since the armed robbery of his Smokey stock. Still and all, the contract Buddy signed with Snuffy had been forged in the sluggish and self-righteous bowels of the United States Government’s implacable bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., and in order to terminate this contract, Buddy had to explain things to headquarters back East, and naturally headquarters back East replied, “Nonsense! If they’re selling like hotcakes, the contract should maybe be renegotiate
d, but never terminated!”
There was no way, however, that Snuffy Ledoux wanted to renegotiate that contract. In business for himself (though guided by the managerial genius of Onofre Martínez), he could sell the Smokeys directly to the people for three greenbacks a shot, thus earning a buck and a half more than he had been earning per santo in his deal with Buddy.
The original contract, however, called for Snuffy to supply a certain number of Smokeys, and at the time he decided to go into business for himself Snuffy had only supplied Buddy with half the statuettes called for in their legal agreement. Which was again okay with Buddy, who lived in Milagro and thus represented a kind of everpresent moving target. Hence, whatever Snuffy and the other townsfolk wanted to do with those little Smokeys, God bless ’em and Merry Christmas and far be it from Buddy to interfere.
The new arrangement wasn’t okay with Uncle Sam, however. Namely, because Uncle Sam, thanks to Buddy Gabaldón, had shelled out a couple of hundred dollars to Snuffy Ledoux as an advance against all those Smokey the Bears Snuffy planned to produce, and here was Snuffy welshing on his word. Uncle Sam also suspected that Buddy Gabaldón was lying about the whole thing. “They use them for voodoo dolls?” the Regional Director Tommy Bascomb screamed, via the telephone, into Buddy’s right ear. “You got to be kidding!”
“Why don’t you come up here and see for yourself,” Buddy whimpered.
“You’re darn tootin I’m gonna come up there and see for myself,” Tommy Bascomb threatened. “And I’m gonna start proceedings against that Ledoux character if he refuses to come across!”
Ai, Chi-hua-hua! Buddy Gabaldón hung up the phone and he felt like barfing.
He also felt as if suddenly his life wasn’t worth a plug nickel.
A few days later Tommy Bascomb guided his big, shiny green, U.S. Government Regional Director’s Forest Service truck to a stop in front of the Milagro district headquarters and clomped inside. Two minutes later he walked out again accompanied by Buddy Gabaldón, and they pulled away from the headquarters heading for Snuffy Ledoux’s humble adobe abode on the west side of town.
“How about stopping at my place first,” Buddy suggested.
“What for?” Tommy asked.
“I want to pick up my rifle, my pistol, and a few hand grenades. You never can tell.”
Tommy Bascomb scoffed, parked in front of Snuffy Ledoux’s decrepit hovel, and the two men strode inside, Bascomb brandishing a rolled-up copy of the government’s contract with Snuffy like a knight’s lance, Buddy all hunched over and just about walking sideways in order to present as small a target as possible.
Snuffy greeted them with the openhearted good humor and warmth he usually reserved for rattlesnakes, gila monsters, and the bubonic plague. He was sitting in the middle of a dark room surrounded by maybe a hundred and twenty foot-high statuettes of Smokey the Bear. Onofre Martínez and Amarante Córdova were off in another corner painting the Smokeys. Tommy Bascomb unrolled the contract and thrust it under Snuffy’s nose, and Snuffy sniffed it and then squinched down his eyebrows, pretending to study the various clauses the regional director so self-righteously proffered. Buddy Gabaldón knew Snuffy couldn’t sign his own name, let alone read, or write, or even speak English, but Buddy was so busy trying to remain inconspicuous in the background that he didn’t bother to inform Tommy Bascomb of this fact.
“According to this contract,” Tommy Bascomb said, “you owe the United States Government one hundred and ten more Smokey the Bears, for which you have already been paid.”
Snuffy shrugged and, in Spanish, suggested the regional director place one of his fingers somewhere and then afterward suck on it like on a popsicle stick.
“What did he say?” Tommy Bascomb asked Buddy.
“He says he begs to differ with you but he feels he has already fulfilled his contract obligations,” Buddy whimpered.
“Bullshit. If he’s gonna give me the runaround, the government will simply attach what is the government’s due. Help me cart these little statues out of here.”
Thus, when Tommy Bascomb drove his big green government truck away from Snuffy Ledoux’s house, the back of it was filled up with a hundred-and-ten Smokeys. He and Buddy transferred the Smokeys from the truck to the back room of the district headquarters, and when Buddy locked up after they had finished this job, he kissed his fingertips and touched them tenderly to the wooden door of his office, saying good-bye to the building which had housed his hopes, his dreams, and his paycheck for almost a decade.
Next morning, sure enough, many things had happened. To begin with, the throats of the three Forest Service horses in the corral behind headquarters had been slit, and a little Smokey statuette had been shoved halfway up the ass of each dead horse. Likewise, the tires on Tommy Bascomb’s big green government truck had been slashed, the slogan CHINGA SMOKEY! had been painted all over his vehicle, and another santo had been whittled down so it could be jammed up the truck’s tailpipe. The remaining Smokeys had perished in the fire that had quietly, without any alarm being given, burned the district headquarters to the ground.
Tommy Bascomb stared at the carnage, then he started to cry.
“I guess there must of been a short circuit or something in the wiring,” Buddy Gabaldón mumbled lamely.
And that was the Smokey the Bear statue (or santo) riot.
And that was also the morning Snuffy Ledoux skipped town, never to return.
Buddy Gabaldón was subsequently relieved of his Milagro post and transferred to the regional director’s office in the capital where he became a mere bureaucratic cipher, plowing through mountains of paper work at half his former salary. Sometimes he mourned the good outdoor life at top pay that had been his in Milagro, but after a while the security of his capital job came to outweigh what he had lost, and he forged a separate peace with the disaster that had cost him his former post.
Now it happened—arriving finally in the present (the present being approximately three days after the softball game that was called on account of attempted murder)—that an equipment request from an outlying station, namely, the Milagro station, came across the desk of Buddy Gabaldón’s co-worker, Pete Casquabel, in the Capital City regional headquarters office they shared.
“Hey, get a load of this OETB-15 double-zero form!” Casquabel exclaimed.
“What’s in it?” Buddy Gabaldón asked, running a hand through his sparse graying hair.
“It’s a request from a guy named Carl Abeyta in the Chamisa County Milagro district headquarters for a bunch of bulletproof vests. Now what the hell do I do with a thing like this?”
“Lemme see that form.” Buddy frowned, bit his bottom lip, scratched his head, and eventually—solemnly—floated the paper back to Casquabel.
“Just process it with a green flag,” he said quietly. “If I know Milagro, I think we better grant them their last request.”
Part Three
“We will be like the Vietnamese.”
—Ruby Archuleta
By noon on the day after Joe Mondragón “stole” his cow back from the Forest Service, Nick Rael was able to confirm a definite run on ammunition. It began when Tranquilino Jeantete, even before opening the Frontier Bar, entered the store and purchased a box of .30–30 ammo, also a carton of .22 shorts. Next Joe Mondragón himself came in asking for two boxes of .30–30s and one box each of .45s, .270 rifle shells, .22 longs, and 16-gauge number 4 shotgun shells on credit.
Nick dialed M in his credit box and informed Joe that as soon as he paid up the ninety-six dollars he owed for groceries, he could have the ammo on credit.
Joe said, “What do you mean ninety-six bucks? Lemme see that bill!”
Nick showed him the bill. “That’s your signature,” he said very politely.
Joe glared at him. “I got to have that ammo, Nick. You know as well as I do some son of a bitch put a slug through my living room window the other night, and I have to defend myself.”
“When you deliver me the mo
ney for your bill, I’ll be glad to put you on credit again.”
Joe snarled, “Maybe the next bullet will knock out that plate glass window you got up front, Nick.”
“Is that a threat—?”
“Nobody’s issuing any threats. You just better sign me up for them shells or who’s telling what kind of trouble might happen, that’s all.”
Nick picked up the phone behind the counter and dialed a number. “Hello, Bernie? Nick here, over at the store. Listen, maybe I got a problem. José Mondragón, he’s over here, wants to buy some bullets, but he hasn’t paid up his bill so I can’t extend him any more credit. He’s a little pissed-off by this fact and has made a couple of what I’d call threatening statements. Maybe you’d—”
“Fuck you,” Joe said. “Forget it.”
“Did you tell the sheriff somebody shot a hole in your house?” Nick called after Joe.
“Tell him yourself,” Joe snapped, kicking open the screen door. “He probably fired the shot himself.”
While Joe was on the porch, angrily thumbing two dimes into the soft drink machine, Bud Gleason’s Chevy Blazer pulled up in front of the store. Bud swung down from behind the wheel, and Horsethief Shorty ambled around from the passenger side.
“’Lo,” Bud said, keeping his eyes straight ahead as he entered the store. “Hola, José, que ’stasaciendo?” Shorty grinned cheerily, catching the screen door as it started to close, and he followed the real estate agent inside, some pebbles chucked by Mercedes Rael plinking at his heels.
Bud Gleason purchased a box each of .270 rifle bullets and .357 magnum pistol shells. Shorty selected a box of .32s on credit, also some .22 longs.
“You know,” Shorty said as he signed the Dancing Trout’s charge account sheet, “you better hang that Mexican target out there on your porch someplace else, Nick, or you’re liable to wind up with a front wall full of holes and a leaky pop machine.”
